


eastward

by quadrille



Category: The Half-Made World Series - Felix Gilman
Genre: Banter, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Painplay, Vignettes, Weird West, Yuletide, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:28:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: After that headlong rush into the unmade world, with the Line nipping and chasing and hungering at their heels, it felt strange to stop. No clamouring sense of panic, with the rush of prey scurrying on and on. They had time, for once, to stop and breathe. Heal. Recover.The Great War had been raging for hundreds of years; it could wait a few more weeks.
Relationships: Lysvet Alverhuysen/John Creedmoor
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	eastward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cadmean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I was so, so pleased to see that someone else loves these rare books like I do, so having the chance to write this for you was a delight. Hope you enjoy, and hope I managed to capture it well enough. ♥

The Lysvet Alverhuysen who came out of the West was not, strictly speaking, the same woman who walked into it so many months and lifetimes ago.

Time had detached and come unspooled, like a forlorn loose thread trailing from a skirt; since she threw aside her golden watch and the days stopped rolling along at their predictable clip, she wasn’t entirely sure how much time had actually passed. When the man and the woman came straggling out of the wilderness and into the aptly-named town of World’s End, looking haggard and half-starved and his injuries still-healing, it was frankly a miracle that they still lived.

She had asked for a doctor first; her skills in sawbones and physical field medicine were still inadequate, and Creedmoor needed help. An on-call physician came to their inn bedroom, bespectacled and carrying a black leather bag and looking so _professional_ that she almost burst into tears just at the sight of it.

It wasn’t until the next morning, sitting over a civilised lonesome breakfast and a chipped mug of actual honest-to-god coffee, that she thought of checking the date.

“What day is it?” Liv asked the man at the nearest table. She had to clarify for him that she needed the actual date, month. Possibly even year.

This was the westernmost town at the edge of the frontier, but at least it had some trappings of society. She bought a news periodical from the general store, then tucked it under an elbow: it was mostly advertisements for farming supplies; caravans setting out and needing to hire additional hands; florid headlines about the Line tightening its iron grip harder on Kloan. She read it all with a distant kind of academic interest.

It was curious to think that, once upon a time, she’d needed her nerve tonic to sleep. To handle the stress and strain. To take deep breaths and not panic when handling something new and unfamiliar. And now… 

Returning to their room, Liv tossed the paper onto her bed and then settled on the edge of his, scrutinising the pale and sweating man. He was half-dead, and nowhere near so handsome as he’d once been.

“I’ve changed my mind. Dying would be a relief,” Creedmoor breathed, a ragged exhale. He looked miserable.

Her fingers, light and quick, peeled back the bandages around his midriff and checked on his healing wounds. She clicked her tongue at the sight. She had sawn open muscle and sinew like handling a pig at the slaughter; her knife had gone up under his ribs; it was still ugly.

“Dying’s a luxury we can’t afford right now, Creedmoor.”

“We made it to civilisation. Or what passes for it.” His eyes drifted over her shoulder, to the window, the low wooden roofs of World’s End. “You can handle the rest on your own. Believe it or not, Liv,” interrupting himself with a cough, “—you’re actually rather capable.”

The woman snorted. “You say that as if you’re not just trying to opt out like a coward. If I didn’t leave you to die at the edge of the world, I’m not leaving you to die here.” Her fingers pressed a little harder against the bandage, and he hissed in pain. Aware and awake enough for that, at least. He wasn’t delirious. That was a good thing. “Besides. I’d get awfully bored on the trip east all by myself. You’re not leaving me.”

She would keep him alive by sheer spite alone.

  


* * *

  


After that headlong rush into the unmade world, with the Line nipping and chasing and hungering at their heels, it felt strange to stop. No clamouring sense of panic, with the rush of prey scurrying on and on. They had time, for once, to stop and breathe. Heal. Recover.

The Great War had been raging for hundreds of years; it could wait a few more weeks.

Creedmoor healed, slowly and stubbornly. He was a terrible patient. His master had always healed his injuries so quickly that he never knew the art of convalescence; he was cranky, tetchy and impatient like an old hound snapping its teeth at anyone who drew too near. The local doctor startled at his moods, and was nervous and trepidatious around the gunslinger.

Liv was the only one who didn’t flinch at Creedmoor’s attitude; she simply told people not to mind her father’s tantrums.

“A father,” he scoffed, sounding aggrieved. His vanity was hurt. “Is that what I’ve become? So aged and useless? Is this how my story ends? Pissing myself like the old man did. You’ll have to tend to me and—”

“I am not,” Liv cut in, “changing your trousers for you. Our friendship doesn’t extend quite so far.”

“Are we friends, then, Liv?”

She paused over that question. She could have batted something back, an instinctive little bit of banter and attitude, but it _was_ a good question.

“I don’t know what we are,” she said, honestly.

Admittedly, her bedside manner wasn’t the best either. She could be a tireless listener, patient and kind when it came to trying to unravel the wounds of the mind… but when it came to these physical ailments, she felt useless. She had learned to look at his injuries unflinching, to not shrink away from blood, but there wasn’t much she could do for him yet.

  


* * *

  


Out in the wilderness, two weeks before their arrival at World’s End, she’d realised what a mess they were. What a horrifying pair they made.

“You look terrible,” Liv proclaimed one morning, while making a feeble attempt at combing through the tangles in her own hair.

“I look like shit,” he agreed. Fairly amiably, all things considered.

When they’d first met at the House Dolorous, John Creedmoor had been unnerving. Inhumanly handsome, strangely youthful even as his face betrayed a wisdom beyond his years — with their unnatural lifespans, the Agents were like specimens preserved in amber. He’d always laughed and smiled, even as his smiles never reached his eyes. Cleanly-shaven, even wearing some cologne that he’d won or hustled from the other men in games of poker.

Here, in the wilds, he was a ragged beast. Beard and hair growing long and unkempt. Eyes like fiery coals in the sunken hollows of his face. Shoulders stooped with pain. Clothes filthy with dirt and dried blood that hadn’t scrubbed out; they hadn’t the cleaning supplies.

In short: Looking little better than the General had, on their headlong journey west.

“Don’t tell me you’ve lost all your vanity along with your Gun,” she said, and the withering scorn in her voice was meant to goad him into action.

And it worked.

They kept passing dried-out creeks, or crevasses with only the smallest trickle of water for their flasks, but the next time they came across a proper river Creedmoor limped right into it. Started stripping off his clothes and throwing them onto the riverbank, and Liv swiftly averted her eyes, staring fixedly at a knot of the nearest tree.

“My apologies for scandalising you so,” he called out from behind her, and she kept her head turned.

He washed the blood from his hair, scrubbed the dirt from his skin until he accidentally ripped open one of his wounds and started bleeding into the stream and had to be gently re-bandaged. He sawed off his hair, like she’d done when the blood had first indelibly marred those fine blonde locks.

  


* * *

  


When they had to provide pseudonyms a couple towns before Clementine, they settled almost accidentally into _Elizabeth Harper_ and then, by default, _Old Man Harper_. When he heard what she’d chosen, he burst into laughter.

“A woman after my own heart. Elizabeth isn’t far off from Lysvet.”

“You’re one to talk. You always went by John.”

“I’ve never been accused of an abundance of imagination.”

This silver-tongued fabulist, spinner of tales, charming liar. She simply _stared_ at him until Creedmoor laughed again.

  


* * *

  


She occasionally found him practicing and fumbling with his gun, stiff fingers (they hadn’t all healed straight) trying to reload the bullets. Another thing he’d never had to do before.

Liv watched him until Creedmoor seemed to realise he was being watched, and he looked up, pride stinging and his eyes dark and stormy, furious. No longer that perfect indomitable inhuman Agent.

She liked him better this way, she thought.

Other times, he’d be camped out in front of the crackling fireplace at an inn, looking for all the world like an old man warming his weary bones. When he looked into the fire and the smoke, there was a distant and faraway look in his eye. Head cocked like a dog listening for a whistle, waiting and waiting for something that never came.

Liv always wanted to ask him if he missed Marmion; if it was like the death of a friend; the abandonment of a family member. But she couldn’t quite sort out the words on her tongue, and he’d rankle at being placed under the magnifying glass like one of her subjects, anyhow.

  


* * *

  


With civilisation came shaving cream, and soap.

Creedmoor sat on a stool in their room, a basin of warm water on the table, his chin raised and Liv standing behind him with a sharp blade at his throat. His eyes locked on hers in the mirror. (His own hands shook too much for this delicate action; they weren’t as steady as they’d once been.)

“Bringing back fond memories?” he asked, his grin a flash of white, a ghost of his rakish confidence. His throat bobbed under her thumb, and she tugged his ear sharply to rein him in.

“Don’t tempt me, Mr. Creedmoor.”

“Please. How many times do I have to tell you to just call me Creedmoor?”

“Don’t tempt me, _Creedmoor_.”

The blade balanced delicately in her hands, and a single droplet of blood welled up as she pressed just a little too deeply, a warning. With an application of pressure she could, so easily, slice into his aorta. She could feel his pulse beating strong and steady beneath her fingertips; the warmth of his blood radiating like a furnace. It was such a little thing compared to her first murder. She could kill him. Again. A second time.

His breath was hot against her hand.

She scraped the blade against his skin until he was clean-shaven, and handsome once more.

  


* * *

  


He still slept with a gun under his pillow and eternally close to hand. Whenever they were on the road and in the woods with Ransom, Creedmoor sometimes still woke in the middle of the night, automatically reaching for his weapon, trying to shoot a rabbit and failing like he hadn’t before.

(It was a gun, not a Gun.) 

She remembered, sometimes, that scrabbling chaotic fight in the dunes. She would have thought it would have carved itself into her memory, like the nightmares that had plagued her so at the House — but time and practicality (and, likely, shock) had blurred them into a blank canvas.

Once and only once on their journey west had she touched the Gun. They had been caught by some of the stragglers of the Line; in the scuffle, Marmion had been knocked from Creedmoor’s grip, gone flying to the ground (and in doing so, planted an idea in Liv’s head that would take root weeks later). It caught them all off-guard, and Creedmoor worked on dispatching the men with his hands alone — he didn’t actually need the weapon, not with that strange and prodigious strength — but there were still others rushing in behind them, and in that moment Liv looked at the weapon in the dirt, and she made a choice, and she leapt for it.

Her fingertips grazed the dark and gleaming grip. And as she touched it, time seemed to freeze, slow to an agonising crawl.

—You.

The voice was sulphur and smoke; it felt like she would choke on it. Ringing in her ears like a blacksmith’s hammer on hot iron, ringing and ringing, and in that din there was a voice. It both did and did not sound like Creedmoor.

—Me, she said, dazed, because what else was there to say? 

—He is mine. He is not yours. Your efforts will be for nothing.

It made her want to laugh. So territorial. As if she wanted him. He was wanted for a very particular purpose, a particular usefulness.

—I’ve no doubt that you think that.

—You will not sway him from our cause. He comes to heel. He always comes to heel.

 _Uncharitable_ , Liv thought, _and likely true_. Every time she imagined she caught a glimmer of thoughtful hesitation from the man, remorse or indecision, the Gun eventually found its way back and spurred its heels into his mind and his expression smoothed over. With dedication and resignation alike. Sometimes he looked at her and she thought he looked awfully lost.

—Perhaps. But right now, Marmion, our mutual friend still needs you to save the day. Again. 

—He should kill you. We have told him many times to kill you. And yet he does not.

It should have sounded like it hated her — she had a fairly good feeling that the Gun hated her — but the voice was flat, hollow, emotionless. As inhuman as a drumbeat. As hooves on hard-packed earth. Liv could taste blood in her mouth; she had been biting her tongue. And she said:

—Maybe there’s hope for him yet.

And Liv’s fingers curled around the grip of the weapon, and touching it burned like fire, it was not for her, it was not hers, like touching something uncomfortably warm and alive, but then she wound back her arm and threw the Gun. It spun glinting through the air, and Creedmoor’s arm shot up and caught it: faster than her eye could follow his movement, as smooth and automatic as if the weapon itself were an extension of his body, as if it were coming home. He’d cocked the barrel before she’d even seen him catch it. The thunder of the bullet was already echoing in her ears.

Two men lay dead and bleeding on the ground, blood pooling beneath them, one of them missing most of his face.

She was breathing hard and fast, as if she’d run a mile. Time had lurched itself back into motion but seemed to be moving jerkily, unnaturally. She could still smell the gunpowder and the sulphur.

“My gratitude,” Creedmoor said, with a chivalrous tip of his hat to her. Smoke trailed from the barrel of the Gun. It looked insufferably pleased with itself somehow.

“I’m never touching that thing ever again,” she said, and so she didn’t.

  


* * *

  


At the next town, he was finally walking by his own volition again. When the innkeeper asked for their names, and in the pause while she was trying to think of their next alias, Creedmoor cut in:

“Mr and Mrs Connell,” he announced smoothly. An elbow leaning against the counter, a coin sliding across it to pay for their room. One bed.

She looked at him. He shrugged back.

 _It’s cheaper,_ he mouthed.

Despite what she knew of his reputation and his appetites (tongues had wagged at the hospital, the nurses gossiping), he didn’t touch her, and stayed chastely on his half of the creaking bed. She couldn’t tell if she was offended or relieved.

  


* * *

  


They had, without her realising it, started to develop their own shorthand.

Weeks (or had it been months? it was hard to tell) of lonesome travel had done it. She grew to know Creedmoor’s moods, his piques, or when he had something on his mind. When he’d caught the sound of some predator in the underbrush and needed her to be silent, Liv dropped like a stone at a mere glance from him, and held her breath. When she came over in the morning and nudged his faux-sleeping body with the toe of a boot, he knew to rise and to not complain about it. When they approached another town, they glanced at each other, and communicated in the flicker of exchanged looks.

_Should we approach or go around?  
I don’t sense any presence of the Line.  
We should go in._

All in the arch of an eyebrow, the twist of a smile, the shrug of one shoulder. Their heads bent towards each other, her voice whispering fiercely in his ear.

Liv had, once upon a time, bitten back her words around the stodgy and venerable professors emeritus who so dearly loved the sound of their own voices. Creedmoor loved the sound of his own voice, too, but she grew comfortable interrupting him. While he groused, surprisingly goodnaturedly, about the infernal nagging of an infernal woman, and how he’d simply traded one slavedriver of a master for another—

She suspected he simply enjoyed the complaining.

  


* * *

  


After the disaster at White Rock (or the _miracle_ , as the papers called it) and their necessarily parting ways with Harry Ransom, Creedmoor found himself riveted by the accounts of their supposed exploits in the papers. It kept spreading in wider and more diffuse stories, like ripples in a pond, like a set of dominos tumbling outwards. Everywhere they turned, it seemed there were whispers and rumours of their activities, and Harry always with them, even if they hadn’t seen him for ages.

“I’m not even an Agent, and he keeps saying I am.” She couldn’t tell if she was affronted or not.

“Bastard sure knows how to spin a story,” Creedmor said. A touch annoyed, a touch admiring. They were holed up at another camp outside another small nameless town, trying to stay off the grid. Thanks to Harry, fake sightings of the pair spread like wildfire. Them and their miraculous weapon, their new war against Gun and Line alike.

They hadn’t even retrieved the damned thing yet.

“I don’t know about you, Creedmoor, but I’d wanted to handle this with a bit more discretion.”

Liv dyed her hair a darker, mousy brown. Creedmoor started affecting a heavier limp with the cane that he didn’t need (and admittedly, the loss of his master was its own disguise: he didn’t much look like an Agent anymore).

  


* * *

  


After enough travel, they had finally reached a larger city, inching their way back across the map and towards the settled world. But with larger cities came other concerns.

Liv was carrying provisions home one evening on a darkened street, her arms full, when there was the familiar click of a barrel (she had grown used to that sound, like the sound of a familiar predator gnashing its teeth) and she went stock-still.

“Hand over the money pouch, sweetheart.”

They had so very little. They’d already had to turn to stealing. Creedmoor had picked up odd jobs. They needed to get east, to the shadow of the Dryden Engine. They did not have the money to spare.

Liv tried not to look at the windows of the inn, but her gaze went there anyway. “John,” she said sharply, her voice rising.

His scent and hearing were no longer the preternaturally-enhanced senses they’d once been — he was just a man now, nothing more nor less than a man — but at her call, a minute later a shadow detached itself from the doorway and came closer. Temporarily blocking the light.

“Leave it, old man,” one of the two men laughed, his gun (not a Gun) unwavering as it pointed to Creedmoor’s temple.

“I’d advise you not to test my daughter here,” Creedmoor said, his voice dry, a beating thread of amusement in it. “She’s a competent little murderess.”

Their gazes turned back to her, laughing and incredulous. Underestimating the old man at their backs. He did not project that same foreboding energy he once had. But in that moment, when they let their guard down, Creedmoor struck.

Slow enough that she could watch it happen, this time: but he still moved like a viper, one man down and choking on a collapsed windpipe, the other crumpling on a broken kneecap. There was a flailing scuffle, the sound of fists colliding with skin, the crack of knuckles against Creedmoor’s cheek.

As the robber fell, though, his gun went off. There was a burst of swearing, a smattering of colourful curses as Creedmoor’s now-bleeding leg couldn’t hold his weight.

“Fuck. _Fuck._ I keep forgetting how much that hurts—”

He always pushed beyond his endurance, still feeling out where his new limits lay, unaccustomed to having limits at all. When Liv ignored the bodies and jammed her shoulder under his to help him stand, she felt blood beneath her hands. He was still stocky, still muscled, so it wasn’t like lifting the General. Instead she had to help him, hobbling, back to the inn and back to their room. She still wasn’t a field surgeon, but this injury wasn’t as bad as the others. Maybe. She hoped.

“You idiot,” Liv said, but fondly. “You keep forgetting you’re just an old man now. You can’t keep behaving like you’re superhuman, you know.”

“You’ve got quite the tongue on you these days. Have you noticed that, Liv?”

So she had.

The Lysvet Alverhuysen who came out of the West was not, strictly speaking, the same woman who first walked into it. And this limping human man, well, he wasn’t the terrifying Agent of the Gun that had strode so joyfully west, either.

“I thought I’d play the hero again,” he said, carelessly. A calculated carelessness, but she could hear the strain in it. His gambles with his own safety were no longer cheating with an assured victory, a stacked deck, weighted dice. Now, his risks actually meant something.

She’d forced the door open and it clattered shut behind them. Creedmoor grumbled as he fumbled with his leg, checked that the bullet had gone right through, and set about bandaging it. Once upon a time, his body would have spat out the bullets, and he’d have been unflinching as bone reknit itself, as his skin sealed itself back up before their eyes. Now, it took effort. Patience. More bandages.

When Liv looked at Creedmoor, she saw him wavering on his feet. Scarred neck, rough stubble on his jaw, blue eyes crinkled with laughter lines, brown hair shot through with grey (now more grey than brown, after the West). Her fingers splayed against his rough shirt, at the line across his abdomen where she knew the particularly deep scar lay, the one she had left on him.

She tugged on John’s shirt until he came closer.

He tasted of blood, and smoke.

The restless hunger that had haunted her since she crossed the mountains. To be something else. To _do_ something else. To not be the quiet, mousy doctor with the frail nerves and the tragic past. She was doing something important, here, for the world. _They_ were important.

“John—” she breathed.

“You’re being awfully familiar, ma’am,” he said with a wink, as if they hadn’t walked across half the continent together, gone to the ends of the earth and back, as if her knife hadn’t been between his ribs. When he looked down at her, his smile reached his eyes. Liv laughed.

This close, she could see the mottled bruise darkening his eye, dark and purpled in the shape of the men’s knuckles. She wasn’t used to the sight; before, any burst blood vessels would have started knitting themselves together too soon, and never left any trace of themselves.

Her fingers automatically rose to his face and traced the lines of the bruise, and impulsively pressed in until a jab of pain drove itself into his skull. He hissed again and his hand snapped out, caught hers in a vise-like grip. She couldn’t struggle loose even if she wanted to. She could see his chest rising and falling, quicker now than it ever had. In all their adventures, he hadn’t actually needed to breathe, had never truly gotten winded.

“Just checking,” Liv said, and kissed him again. And with one smooth movement, she shoved the man backwards onto the bed.

While his grin broadened, she clambered forward and settled over the man’s hips; she felt daring, and new and alive. Her hands were dusty with his dried blood and his hands were rough as they slipped up the line of her thighs, under her skirts.

He was approximately the age of her late husband, or as close as she could reckon, but the differences were as stark as night and day. Poor Bernhardt had been heavy and dull, like a blunted bread knife. He’d settled over her and she had submitted because at least he was kind too, and patient, and she could have pictured worse for herself. But he had still been a tired old man whose heart had given out at the dinner table.

Even without the unnatural vigour of the Gun, John Creedmoor was still ravenous. Making up for lost time, all those months of more pragmatic concerns and appetites ignored, unquenched; his hands roamed and slipped and tore at her clothes, a loose button pinging off and scattering somewhere on the floor.

She swore. “ _John._ I only have the two dresses with me—”

“I’ll steal you another,” he promised, his lips and tongue against her ear, licking his way down her neck, and she shivered. His grip tightened on her hips. There was something cold and metallic between them, so she reached down and felt— just his belt, and a gun, nothing more.

She dipped her hand into the holster and gently, carefully, set the gun aside on the table. He made a noise, a half-laugh.

  


* * *

  


In the morning, Mr and Mrs Connell drank their coffee in the common room, and shot each other wry looks over the table that seemed to speak multitudes. They still had their internal language; that had not changed, and had in fact grown closer and more intimate and tight-knit.

And so they continued East, and continued to share a bed.

It was, after all, cheaper.


End file.
